How one atheist sees life

This post might take some thinking, some reflective thought. I hope that it does.

We’ve all done it. Played along to get along. The game of life, all that crap you do every day so that you can rush around in some strange place for a week or two, burning through all your savings, so that you can tell everyone what a wonderful time you had while you weren’t doing all that crap you do every day.

Game:

a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.
synonyms: pastime, diversion, entertainment, amusement, distraction, divertissement, recreation, sport, activity

We don’t always realize it. Graduate from school not sure what we’re going to do and the next thing you know you are caught up in trying to pay your bills and meet the requirements of being human. Eat, sleep, fornicate, drink, breathe… in any order that you like. Lather, rinse, repeat. Our interests distract us and we become overburdened just trying to meet the 5 requirements, the 5 necessary things that our bodies demand we do. Sure, some of us try to ignore them or do too much of one or more of them, but in the end we’ll do all 5. Our biology ensures that this will be. That’s it. The 5 requirements of mammalian life, and it appears that it applies to all forms of life that we know of.

Most of us will find that even if the 5 are satiated and no more difficult to acccomplish than opening our eyes each morning, something else is missing. Something else needs to be done. Those 5 just simply are not enough.

Not necessity, not desire – no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything – health, food, a place to live, entertainment – they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche was a fairly smart guy. What could that demon be? How are your demons today? What is true must be true for the best of us and the least of us. That demon has to be able to affect all of us, from the greatest human to the lowest worm. Thought of it yet? Think harder. Fear. Fear is the demon. Fear that we will not accomplish one of the 5 requirements now or in the future. Our biology drives us this way. It tells us to be afraid, makes us react whenever something, at its core, will stop us from doing one or more of those 5 things for too long. There it is, the five laws and the only demon we all share. Think about it for a bit. All the rest of human society and culture is based on these things, built up layer upon layer of complexity until we no longer recognize it. So many layers of complexity that we have thought ourselves more than animals for a long time, looking down upon those that do the five with much greater efficiency than ourselves.

So many are sure that the world, that life is an illusion yet you are certain that your world and your life are real. Your mind will tell you many things in your life. That inner voice, your subconscious twin. It will tell you what beauty is, what it is not and it will tell you that the limb you used to have is still there. Can you truly know that it’s missing or not if your mind tells you so stealthily? Your mind interprets all the data that it can find and tells you what the world is, what society is, and what they are not. Who are you talking to when you talk to yourself. Who answers back when you reflectively seek answers to problems in this illusion of life? Do you have a twin inside your mind?

When you tell yourself that you’ve done the best you can for today do you hear a reply? There is much to think about. Will both of you agree on what the answers are? Will you both even conclude that there are answers? If there are no answers, then what? What if the big questions have no answers? Oh, there’s that demon again. Now the argument with your twin begins in earnest. One of you dared ask “why are we here?”, “For what purpose are we here?” The wisest among us end such argument with the simple thought that it does not matter, here we are and here we will remain until someone figures out how to change that. The luckiest among us never ask the questions, they simply get on with the business of being. Once we ask our twin that kind of question all sorts of mayhem follows.

We worship ideals that we have deified, accepting the wisdom of this illusion because our ideal dictates to us what we must need do, how it is that we make sense of the world we cannot be part of. No, you are your mind and it will never touch or taste or smell the world around you. It does not have those abilities. It simply crunches data and models the world around you. Sure it has sensors but your mind will never know what a rose smells like, really know. It will never know the color of a juicy apple, never really know. All it, all that you will ever know is an approximation of what the world is like. You and your twin are trapped inside a skull. Yes, it is _your_ skull but it’s no better than any other skull. It just happens to be the one wrapped around the brain that your mind is in, that you are in.

You will never be closer to the world than some electrical signals tell you that you are. If we live in a simulation you will never know because whether it’s a simulation or just nerves bringing you sense data, your brain will interpret that data as reality. When you have a ‘reality’ the game begins. By the time you were 2 years old the game had begun. The day you were born, not so much.

It’s a game. Complex, scary, difficult. Still, it’s just a game. It’s the only game there is. Even that is complex for you can create a game within the game, play by your own rules in that part and by the other rules in other parts. The rules get complicated, layer upon layer of rules. What if you don’t want to play? What if you want to simply be? Can you step outside the game? Can you stop playing and still meet the 5 requirements? What would it be like to be outside the game?

Oh, that’s a lot of questions for you and your twin to talk about. I wonder what answers you’ll come up with? I wonder if you’ll share them here?

Okay, maybe not. I think that to answer the question “what is the meaning of life?” we should start with “what is life?” I’m going show you something. Something they don’t want you to see. I don’t know the future but I know what’s happening now. I know where we’re going.

I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid. You’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you. — Neo

From the perspective of the universe (should it be conscious) this is your life and what it means:

Watch it closely. What do you see? Give up? No idea? Remember that video as you listen to Sean Carroll explain it.

What is the meaning of life? To dissipate energy. To push the universe closer to heat death. Nothing more, nothing less. A quick ride on a burning match and snuffed out. That’s life. Enjoy it, the ride, for all you can.

Like this:

“I will put My Law within them, and on their hearts will I write it; and I will be their God, and they will be My people” – Jeremiah 31:33-34

All human beings have an innate sense of right and wrong, an innate sense of the way they ought to behave. This sense is called the natural, moral law. It is God’s law of right vs. wrong literally written on our hearts, woven into the very fabric of who we are.

7. Once more: contamination is the number one concern. For me, ingesting a product with gluten in it is the same a ingesting something with poison in it. Many others suffer similarly.

So, there it is. It’s bread before it gets to the church. It’s bread when they hand it to you. It’s still bread when you eat it. Not even the glory of god almighty can neutralize the dangers of gluten.

Like this:

In the last few days I’ve found myself thinking about or talking about love several times. One comment made should be a post.

For all I’ve done and seen and experienced, I do not know how to reconcile my thoughts against what the world professes as the meaning of love. If you asked 100 people you will probably get 114 answers. To me, love is the stuff that happens when you’re keeping a commitment to another person.

The commitment does not have to be marriage and the other person does not have to be your lover or spouse. Certainly you can make such commitments without love so it is not the commitment that is love, but I think it might be described as the ransom and tribute given to the other party as promissory note or collateral. It is not this act or that act as many people describe ‘true love’ is to me the act of giving deeply personal collateral for the loan of honesty from another being. In this way, I think the description also applies to dogs. How the repayment is arranged depends on the other particulars of the relationship… it’s not something that a person can only do with one other being. I don’t know what love is but I understand the collateral and commitment to repayment involved to create it.

Gods that do not reveal themselves cannot make a commitment and they cannot love us.